Archive for month: September, 2008

A couple of months ago I found a really clever and easy way to build thousands of links to any site (with your choice of anchor text). In the spirit of sharing I try to promote in this blog, here it is…

PAD your link-building regimen

There are thousands of software developers that provide their solution as a software download (RankSense is one of those), but getting visibility for your solution is an uphill battle due to the large number of competing products in any software niche. One of the easiest ways to get a lot of visibility is to offer a free version of your product and syndicate it through free software download directories.

Now, there are thousands of such directories and submitting your software to each one manually is definitely a pain. Fortunately, there is already a solution for that. All of the software distribution sites support a standard syndication format for content similar to RSS. It’s called PAD (Portable Application Description). Essentially, it is an XML format with all the details about your software, your company, and so on. And most important of all for us marketers, it includes a space to provide our company/product URL and description. In most cases, both result in a link with the anchor text you specify.Read more →

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while—especially after following the contentious discussion in the comments of my last post. Rand Fishkin talks about why SEO firms should not guarantee rankings, and for the most part I agree with everything he says. But I am going to come down on the other side of the fence on this because it concerns a more profound issue that I feel most of us have been sweeping under the rug.

The problem is scammers who claim to be SEOs and who disrepute all of us with what they do. Wherever we draw the line between who is and who isn’t a “real SEO” is not important. There is no central authority or watchdog group that validates which SEO claims are true and which are false. But—and this is a big but—there is one way we can turn the tables. You guessed it: unlike scammers, we can guarantee our results.